16 minute read
NEWS
from AN OPEN APPROACH
by cxoinsightme
Cloudflare, the security, performance, and reliability company helping to build a better Internet, has announced Cloudflare D1, a simple and instant serverless database. Cloudflare D1 will enable developers to start building database-backed applications using Cloudflare Workers with just a few clicks. Data will be stored close to where their users are, providing lightning fast performance without any of the complexities of installing or managing a traditional database.
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Everything from the apps in your phone to SaaS applications for the enterprise to frameworks like Ruby on Rails use databases for storage. And SQL is the dominant language used to query and update those databases, large and small. Cloudflare’s D1 will offer instant access to one of the most widely deployed database technologies in the world, SQLite, directly from Cloudflare Workers. By combining Cloudflare’s serverless development platform with instant databases, developers can build rich, databasebacked applications without ever worrying about deploying or managing a database.
“The hardest part about serverless isn’t actually the code, it’s the storage. Today we’re announcing our first serverless database which we expect will quickly become one of the largest databases in the world,” said Matthew Prince, Co-Founder and CEO of Cloudflare. “Cloudflare D1 is built on Cloudflare’s global network, which we believe will allow us to offer one of the largest and most performant serverless databases on the market so no business needs to be bogged down by the cost and complexity of managing their storage.”
Unlike other databases on the market, Cloudflare D1 will use Cloudflare’s global network to optimise a businesses’ database by locating it as close as possible to their customers, providing the fastest possible experience to users. Additionally, by pairing storage solutions with Cloudflare’s serverless compute platform, Cloudflare is streamlining the developer experience for building full stack applications.
LENOVO LAUNCHES SMARTER IT SUSTAINABILITY WITH CO2 OFFSET SERVICE
Lenovo has announced the Middle East launch of its CO2 Offset Service to its consumer PC portfolio. Available on all, Think commercial PCs, Lenovo Legion and Yoga PCs for consumer and commercial customers, the Lenovo CO2 Offset Service gives consumers a simple and transparent way to offset carbon emissions and help the environment by supporting one of several United Nations Climate Action projects.
As one of the first PC manufacturers to bring this type of carbon compensation service to the IT industry, Lenovo developed CO2 Offset Service as a solution for its customers to help them meet their own environmental goals. However, it is just part of the company’s broader Environmental, Social, Governance (ESG) strategy and ambitions. Recognizing the toll that human activities are taking on our planet, Lenovo has outlined its commitment to become net-zero by 2050 and pledged to positively impacting 15 million lives through philanthropic programmes and partnerships by 2025.
Region-wide, visionary governments have instilled various initiatives as they work towards a more sustainable future. The UAE has a number of federal and municipal policies in place that establish clear goals for the country to shape its future in a more sustainable way. Among the UAE’s environmental projects include the UAE Vision 2021, the UAE Centennial 2071, and the UAE Energy Strategy 2050, which sets a 50% clean energy objective for the country. Several sustainable development goals have already been defined in the UAE, and they act as a guiding concept for most new initiatives including Lenovo’s expansion of the CO2 Offset Service.
Mohammed Hilili, General Manager, Gulf, Lenovo, said, “Lenovo recognises the importance of the global effort to mitigate climate change, having set our own science-based emissions reduction objectives. The launch of our CO2 Offset Service was always meant to assist our customers in their own sustainability efforts, and we’re proud to now be able to offer that assistance to our customers. Recent developments in the UAE include the launch of four pioneering national initiatives to ensure the sustainability of water resources, a program to attract young people to be part of local and global green initiatives and, financing clean energy projects and becoming the first Gulf nation to commit to net zero emissions by 2050.”
FORTINET: CYBERSECURITY SKILLS GAP CONTRIBUTED TO 80 PERCENT OF BREACHES
Fortinet has released its 2022 Cybersecurity Skills Gap Report. The new global report reveals that the cybersecurity skills shortage continues to have multiple challenges and repercussions for organisations, including the occurrence of security breaches and subsequently loss of money. As a result, the skills gap remains a top concern for C-level executives and is increasingly becoming a board-level priority. The report also suggests ways the skills gap can be addressed, such as through training and certifications to increase employees’ education.
Sandra Wheatley, SVP Marketing,
Threat Intelligence and Influencer
Communications at Fortinet said,
“According to the Fortinet report released today, the skills gap isn’t just a talent shortage challenge, but it’s also severely impacting business, making it a top concern for executive leaders worldwide. Through Fortinet’s Training Advancement Agenda (TAA) and Training Institute programs, we are committed to tackling the challenges revealed in the report through various initiatives, including programs focused on cybersecurity certifications and recruiting more women into cyber. As part of this commitment, Fortinet has pledged to train 1 million professionals to increase cyber skills and awareness and make a dent in the skills gap by 2026.” According to (ISC)2’s 2021 Cyber Workforce Report, the global cybersecurity workforce needs to grow 65 percent to effectively defend organisations’ critical assets. While the number of professionals needed to fill the gap has decreased from 3.12 million down to 2.72 million in the past year, this is still a significant void that leaves organisations vulnerable.
Fortinet’s report demonstrates multiple risks resulting from the cybersecurity skills gap. Most notably, 8 in 10 organisations surveyed have suffered at least one breach they could attribute to a lack of cybersecurity skills or awareness. The survey also showed that globally 64 percent of organizations experienced breaches that resulted in loss of revenue, recovery costs and/or fines.
Given the increasing costs of breaches on organisations’ profits and reputation, cybersecurity is becoming more of a board level priority. Globally, 88 percent of organisations that have a board of directors reported that their board asks questions specifically about cybersecurity. And 76 percent of organisations have a board of directors who has recommended increases in IT and cybersecurity headcount.
SUGARCRM PARTNERS WITH REDINGTON GULF
SugarCRM, has annnounced a strategic distribution partnership with Redington Gulf, whereby Redington will distribute the full SugarCRM AI-driven solution portfolio for sales, marketing and customer service to businesses in the Middle East.
Redington will help Sugar extend its CRM platform to businesses across the region through its extensive network of 34,000 resellers and over 70 sales offices around the world, with over 15,000 customers in the Middle East alone.
Redington gains access to Sugar’s portfolio of AI-driven solutions that make the hard things easier for sales, marketing, and customer service professionals. Sugar also offers choice for cloud and on-premises solutions so customers can select the best option for their business. This is a key benefit as most other CRM providers offer their solutions exclusively in the cloud, making them unviable for customers in the Middle East.
With this partnership, SugarCRM continues its global expansion with a growing footprint and commitment in the region. “Redington is a respected player in the Middle East, and the partnership provides us with a substantial opportunity to reach prospects, customers and opportunities through an established channel. This is a significant step to fuel Sugar’s platform growth across the region,” explains James Frampton, Senior Vice President and General Manager, EMEA at SugarCRM.
“Working together, Sugar and Redington will be a dominant force to address the unmet needs of midmarket organizations in the Middle East seeking a modern AI-driven CRM platform to improve customer engagement and boost business growth by delivering a high-definition customer experience,” Frampton adds.
Riverbed has launched a broad strategy to bring industryleading unified observability to customers worldwide and accelerate growth. Front and center in the company’s strategy is the development of an expanded unified observability portfolio, which will unify data, insights and actions to solve one of the industry’s most daunting problems: how to provide seamless digital experiences that are high performing and secure in a hybrid world of highly distributed users and applications, exploding data and soaring
IT complexity.
Riverbed also launched a new brand identity, including the introduction of Alluvio by Riverbed (for Unified Observability), reflecting the evolution of the company and technology, and strong market momentum as evidenced by over 30% year-over-year bookings growth for its visibility and observability solutions in the last three quarters.
“This marks an exciting new chapter for Riverbed,” said Dan Smoot, Riverbed president and CEO. “We’re capitalising on our trusted brand, the dynamic growth, and market momentum for our visibility solutions to position Riverbed as a dominant leader in the rapidly growing observability market. Through our vision to deliver a highly innovative, differentiated SaaS-based Unified Observability portfolio, we will meet an urgent customer need and disrupt the market. We are focused on helping our customers transform massive amounts of data into actionable insights, so they can drive enterprise performance and deliver exceptional digital experiences.”
SANS ANNOUNCES IMMERSIVE SKILLS TRAINING PROGRAMME IN QATAR
SANS Institute has announced its upcoming in-person training program, SANS ICS410 Doha May 2022, from Saturday, May 28 – Thursday, June 2, 2022, at the InterContinental Doha. Taught by real-world practitioners, the course aims to train those cyber workforces supporting and defending industrial control systems in keeping the operational environment safe, secure, and resilient against current and emerging cyber threats.“Due to dynamic nature of industrial control systems, many engineers are unaware of the characteristics and risks of various devices. Furthermore, IT support staff that supply communications pathways and network defenses may not necessarily understand the operational drivers and constraints of the systems. With our ICS410 training, SANS intends to assist traditional IT personnel in the region in completely comprehending the design principles that underpin control systems, as well as how to support those systems in a way that ensures availability and integrity,” said Ned Baltagi, Managing Director, Middle East and Africa at SANS Institute.
Led in person by Stephen Mathezer, SANS ICS410 features the ICS410: ICS/SCADA Security Essentials course. This provides a foundational set of skills and core security principles necessary for the range of tasks that are involved in supporting control systems on a daily basis. Participants will benefit from learning experiences in hands-on, virtual lab to control system attack surfaces, methods, and tools, and develop incident-response skills in a control system environment.
“The purpose of this course is also to emphasize the need for control system engineers and operators to understand their role in cybersecurity. This begins with ensuring that a control system is developed and engineered with cybersecurity in mind, and that cybersecurity is prioritized alongside system reliability throughout the system’s lifecycle,” Baltagi concluded.
The timings for SANS ICS410 are between 8:30 AM and 5:00 PM AST, including breaks. Additionally, participants are eligible to join an exclusive NetWars Tournament with purchase of the course. NetWars is a suite of hands-on, interactive learning scenarios that give students the opportunity to practice their newfound cybersecurity techniques and gain risk-free, practical experience in monitored environments.
AVAYA ENTERS STRATEGIC PARTNERSHIP WITH MICROSOFT
Avaya and Microsoft have expanded their global partnership by pairing the industry leading Avaya OneCloud portfolio with Microsoft Azure to provide organisations with more options to increase their productivity and customer engagement with unrivaled reliability, agility and scale. Building on the success of Avaya OneCloud Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) delivered on Azure, Avaya is now expanding its partnership to include the Avaya OneCloud portfolio on Azure, for customers that want maximum flexibility to deploy in a hybrid, public or private cloud environment.
“Our strategic partnership with Microsoft is an important milestone in our continued transformation to a cloud business model,” said David Austin, Senior Vice President, Strategy and Alliances, Avaya. “The global scale of Microsoft helps ensure that our joint customers rapidly deploy Avaya OneCloud solutions in any cloud environment of their choice with speed, agility and cost competitiveness. This represents a tremendous opportunity for customers to accelerate their journey to the cloud, and a tremendous opportunity for Avaya to expand our goto-market reach through the co-selling efforts we have identified with our trusted partner.”
“Many of our largest customers have standardized on Avaya communications solutions, and offering Avaya OneCloud on Microsoft Azure gives them an additional opportunity to benefit from their investments while accelerating their cloud migration,” said Casey McGee, Vice President, Global ISV Partner Sales, Microsoft. “Together, we are working to help customers around the world transform their businesses, and drive digital transformation and implement workload migration initiatives more rapidly. This is a significant opportunity, particularly for Microsoft customers as they move more workloads to Azure.”
Avaya OneCloud is an experience platform dedicated to empowering organizations to compose unique, modernized and personal experiences that meet the ever-changing needs of their customers and employees. Organizations can more rapidly introduce new experiences and capabilities to their existing solutions, and empower employees to be more productive while working in new ways, and surprise and delight their customers across every interaction.
VEEAM APPOINTS NEW CHIEF REVENUE OFFICER
Veeam Software has appointed John Jester as Chief Revenue Officer (CRO). Jester will lead Veeam’s go-to-market growth strategy and help build upon Veeam’s position as the #1 provider of Modern Data Protection solutions spanning Cloud, Virtual, Physical, Hybrid, SaaS and Kubernetes, said the company.
Jester joins Veeam from a successful tenure at Google Cloud where he helped build the go-to-market organisation through his leadership of the Customer Experience organisation; in this role, he drove cloud adoption and business value for customers, supporting Google Cloud’s growth to over $23B ARR. Prior to Google, Jester spent 20 years at Microsoft leading sales organizations and reimagining the GTM across the customer lifecycle. Specific roles included Corporate Vice President of Worldwide Customer Success, where he established a new organization to drive adoption of Microsoft’s cloud services, Vice President Worldwide Specialist Sales, where he led enterprise sales strategy across the full suite of enterprise cloud services, General Manager UK Enterprise and Partner Group, and General Manager of Global Accounts with responsibility for sales to Microsoft’s top 100 enterprise customers. Throughout his career, Jester has worked closely with partners and sees them as integral to crafting solutions for customers.
“I’m extremely excited about the opportunity to join Veeam,” said John Jester, CRO at Veeam. “Businesses are supporting a rapidly changing and increasingly complex IT environment involving the adoption of cloud, as a Service and containers. On top of that, the frequency and scale of cyberthreats, particularly ransomware, continues to explode. All of this increases the likelihood of severe business interruption. Veeam has demonstrated an industry-leading vision and strategy for Modern Data Protection that delivers the resiliency customers need to move forward with Digital Transformation. I am looking forward to working with the team to help deliver on this vision.”
NUTANIX NAMES NEW CFO
Nutanix has announced the appointment of Rukmini Sivaraman as Chief Financial Officer, effective
May 1, 2022. Sivaraman will succeed
Duston Williams, who is leaving to become CFO of a pre-IPO company in a different space. Williams will remain with Nutanix through April 30, 2022 and work closely with Sivaraman to facilitate a seamless transition.
Sivaraman joined Nutanix in 2017 and currently serves as Senior Vice President of Financial Planning & Analysis. In this role, Sivaraman has been responsible for financial and strategic planning, budgeting, capital allocation and business analytics and insights. Sivaraman has held several roles instrumental to the
Company’s growth and transformation, including Chief People Officer, and before that Senior Vice President of People and
Business Operations, focusing on revenue growth, capital allocation, and all aspects of human resources.
Among her recent accomplishments, she played a leading role in the transaction under which Nutanix received a $750 million investment from Bain Capital in September 2020. Sivaraman brings a combination of extensive finance and technology experience, having previously spent eight years as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs in New York, executing strategic transactions, including IPOs, mergers & acquisitions, and debt financing transactions for software companies. Sivaraman has an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, and an MS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.
“Rukmini has a unique understanding of our company and industry, along with proven financial acumen, and I am confident she will thrive in the CFO role,” said Rajiv Ramaswami, President and CEO of Nutanix. “As SVP of FP&A, Rukmini has been instrumental in evaluating and pursuing value-enhancing growth opportunities and overseeing our financial planning. Rukmini’s compelling financial, strategic, operational, human capital and engineering expertise will be a valuable asset as we continue to deliver on our long-term growth and profitability commitments. Rukmini’s appointment also reflects the deep bench of talent we have cultivated at Nutanix. Supported by our talented finance team, we look forward to benefitting from Rukmini’s expertise and insights as we continue to build on our strong financial position and create value for our shareholders.”
FVC, RE MAGO TO OFFER MULTIPLATFORM VIDEO COLLABORATION SOLUTION
FVC has partnered with UK-based Re Mago to offer the Valarea multi-platform collaboration solution for meeting rooms to customers and resellers in the Middle East. The Valarea Room solution provides organisations with the ability to join video meetings on any platform including major platforms like Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Cisco Webex, Google Meet and more.
With hybrid working becoming the norm, organisations require the ability to join video collaboration meetings on multiple platforms for effective internal and external communication with customers, suppliers and more. Valarea Room provides the ability for users to invite their meeting spaces to video meetings hosted on any platform and simply join the meeting with a single “click to join” experience. The Valarea mobile application also provides users the ability to pair their mobile phones to the platform by simply scanning the QR code displayed on screen. The users’ meetings will be displayed on the touch screen and they can join their meeting by tapping the ‘join’ button.
KS Parag, Managing Director, FVC, said, “Many organisations have a requirement to join various online video meetings from their meeting spaces. With dedicated solutions like Microsoft Teams Room, Zoom Rooms etc, joining virtual meetings on third party platforms is difficult and lacks the feature rich experience offered by each platform. We are excited to offer Valarea Room to our customers to provide them with a native experience on the platform they join a virtual meeting on.
“Utilising each platform’s native desktop application ensures users have the best experience the platforms have to offer. The mobile application also provides a layer of simplicity users are used to when using the personal mobile devices. Online collaboration sessions with peers and colleagues over distance has become a main requirement. With Valarea Room, users can join online whiteboarding sessions via a browser or mobile device and participate in the discussion from anywhere and on any device.”
